Personal Care at Home Bill

My Lords, I support many of the amendments in this group: Amendments 17, 38, 44, 46 and, with some modification, Amendment 47. The important thing about all these amendments is that they would require further interrogation by both Houses of Parliament on the content of the Bill and on the much wider range of issues in which it is enmeshed. I have a specific point on Amendment 44. When something like this is put into place, it is important that we see the outcome in terms of real costs. However, I would also want to add the word "net". We need to look at the net costs of provisions of this kind. The information that I have is that in Wales, for example, the percentage of the cost of providing personal care raised by means-testing is in the region of 14 or 15 per cent. That means that the expenditure is already committed to virtually 85 per cent of actual costs. We need to see what the net cost is in order to properly assess whether savings elsewhere would go some way—perhaps the whole way—towards covering some of these costs. I support these amendments because, as I said, there has to be rethinking and constraint, but I would not want to stop the Bill dead in its tracks. Naïve as I am as a Cross-Bencher and in the ways of party politics, I realise that emergency legislation is the flavour of the month before a general election. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, indicated, this issue is back on the agenda in a sensible and serious way. The wider community is debating this sensibly regardless of whether we in this House and down the Corridor are doing the same. I fear that if the Bill is stopped in its tracks, it will not come back in significant form after an election—whether as a similar Bill or as any other legislation. My fear is that the discussion of these immensely important issues will once again be sent into the long grass because "they are too hard to deal with" or "the problems are too large and the costs would be too great". For various reasons, the latter view is naïve. The costs of pensions in the public sector are too great, but we are not debating those in the same detail. We ought to be looking at this issue and bringing it back. It will not be brought back in any realistic way unless something is put onto the statute book that in the end, to be honest, requires revision. These provisions allow the possibility of such revision.